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Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0
Sale price: $399.99
Binding: Electronics
Brand: Data Robotics
Color: Black
EAN: 0094922723819
Feature(s): Automatically protects your data with no setup or configuration. If the status lights are green, your data is safe.Drobo The Worlds First Storage RobotDrobo uses Data Robotics' SAFE (Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable) StorageTechnologyMakes storage manageable for anybody, regardless of computer knowledge or technical expertise.Non-Stop Data Protection
Autographed: False
Memorabilia: False
Item Dimensions: Height 12.8"Width 15.5"Length 11"Weight 11 lbs.
Label: Data Robotics
List Price: $0.00
Manufacturer: Data Robotics
Model: 900-00002-002
MPN: 900-00002-002
Package Dimensions:
Height: 10.1"
Width: 12.6"
Length: 10.1"
Weight: 10.7 lbs.
Product Group: CE
Publisher: Data Robotics
Studio: Data Robotics
UPC: 094922723819
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Editorial Reviews
Product Description:
As rich media (photos, video, movies, music) continues to devour your storage capacity, you need a solution that allows you to easily manage, protect, and scale storage for your PC or Mac. For you, Data Robotics has created Drobo, the first fully-automated storage robot to take the pain out of keeping your important digital content safe.
Customer Reviews Average rating - 3.5
Rating - 1 Date: 2008-11-04
Content: I own three Drobos. In the last 2 months, two of them have failed; one terminally so, taking with it ~1TB of data. (The other required a series of reboots and rebuilds before the data was accessible again, the whole process took almost 3 weeks.) The worst part: Drobo Customer Support is unreachable, non-responsive, and generally unhelpful.
When it works, it's fine. When it breaks, there's nothing you can do. Unfortunately, it seems there is a lot that can cause it to break (even specific brands and models of HDDs seem to be incompatible -- although one can only find out after owning a Drobo and accessing the User Forums part of the website...)
Great concept, lousy execution, even worse support. Avoid.
Summary: Unreliable
Rating - 5 Date: 2008-10-18
Content: Media center PCs are an indispensable part of your entertainment center, but once you start recording high definition video, they fill up quite quickly, leading you with a desire for more disk space. Unfortunately, the setup of many media center computers makes it difficult to add drives -- either because the drives would make too much noise, or because the case isn't large enough to add drives to. Enter Drobo to the rescue.
I've been incredibly impressed at just how easy the Drobo is to use, just plug it in, throw in a couple of hard drives, and you've got an ever expanding file system. What's better is that the Drobo takes care of all the mundane issues such as setting up RAID and doing data integrity checks for you. What does this mean for you? No more mucking around with software raid. No more managing drive health. No more wondering what to do when your RAID 5 array becomes full. The Drobo just takes care of it.
My Drobo was purchased to replace a 4x320GB drive RAID-5 array for Linux and MythTV. Along with the Drobo I purchased a pair of Western Digital 1TB Green Power drives. Setting up the Drobo was trivial, plug it in, plug in the drives, and format the drobo. Then I copied all my data over to the Drobo, broke down the RAID, and moved two of the drives into the Drobo to give me more space. It's so simple, I just don't need to worry about my drives anymore. I can get about 25MB/s from the Drobo, which is more than enough for multiple high definition video streams.
Some people have raised issues about the noise of the Drobo. Truthfully, I've hardly noticed the noise of the Drobo in my media center. Most of the time the fan isn't running, and even when it does run, it's quiet enough that the TV or stereo easily drowns it out -- even when listening at moderate volumes.
Other folks will raise an issue with the price. The Drobo is not cheap, but it's also not the most expensive of external enclosures. One of the biggest features you get with it is the ability to have on-the-fly limitless expansions, which allows you to incrementally increase the size of your array without having to worry about matching disks. I haven't seen any other enclosures that allow this. So, once your external RAID-5 is full, on a traditional system you'll need to spend lots of money to upgrade all your drives all at once -- not so with Drobo. Pick up new drives at your pace. The Drobo even provides helpful lights so you can see when you need more disk space.
Of course, I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say some things that are sorta strange and less than ideal about the Drobo. First, it takes a while to boot up when power is restored. Usually just a couple of minutes, but if you tell it to allow for very large volumes, it can take much longer. Second, my first Drobo had a bad fan, luckily Data Robotics' customer support was able to ship me a new Drobo with no difficulty. Thirdly, under Linux it seems like the first time the drive is mounted on system boot, it fails quickly, so I need to try and mount the drive twice -- which increments the drive letters for the system. Finally, there is no network interface for the Drobo. You can pick up a Drobo Share to go along with it, but you're probably hooking the Drobo up to some home media server, so it shouldn't matter anyway.
As an experienced system administrator and generally picky person about computers, I was really hesitant about purchasing a Drobo and losing some of the minute controls you can have over a RAID system. After using it for a while, I wonder why I didn't do it before. The Drobo just works -- something that is all too rare in technology today.
Summary: Stable, Quiet, and Easy
Rating - 5 Date: 2008-10-16
Content: I bought this item based on a freinds recomendation, they were spot on. A completely redundant back-up with no set up. I could hardly believe how easy this was.
The manufacturers packaging I recieved my DROBO in is just as impressive as the DROBO itself.
Love this product.
Summary: DROBO - Awesome ! ! !
Rating - 1 Date: 2008-10-11
Content: I just returned my Drobo after it lost 1.2TB of video files. (I bought it from local store not Amazon). It's a great idea, but after two weeks the unit gave an error message in drobo dashboard on start-up, saying it could not repair the drive. The dashboard then showed that the drive was completely empty, whereas the drive itself (which was still appearing on the desktop) had a small fraction of the files it should have had.
I spoke to Drobo who suggested I use Disk Warrior to check the drive (a $99 dollar program), I have a copy so used it and the resulting diagnosis was that the Drobo unit is faulty. I was then told to mail it to Germany (I am in the UK) and they would send another one which may, or may not, be able to read the hard drives created by the first one, depending if the first one trashed them. At this point I cut my losses and returned it to the store where I bought it before the 30 day money back guarantee ran out. I really wanted this peice of kit to work but unfortunately it looks like it needs more work before prime time. If you buy it don't rely on it.
Summary: Great Idea, too many bugs, lost 1.2TB of files!
Rating - 1 Date: 2008-10-01
Content: This machine is only worth it if you run new MacOS or, I believe, Vista. Will NOT
act as a single large partition otherwise. It'll make two small ones.
Also, do not buy it from NewEgg. Their RMA policies blow.
Summary: Runs too hot. Not the machine it should be. Drobo bad.
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